Halo 5: Guardians Is Not Coming To Xbox 360, Will Be Xbox One Exclusive

If you've been holding on to one of the geriatric twins from the seventh generation of gaming, hoping, believing, pleading for publishers within that small dark space in the back of your mind to release newer, bigger, better, next-gen games on the Xbox 360, well, you're about as much in luck as anyone who believed that the Mayan doomsday date was going to occur during a moon's fart in 2012.

According to Geek Wire [via Segment Next] 343 Industries has made it known that they've decided to not make the newest Halo title for a console currently sitting in a retirement home, waiting for its transfer into the hospice for seventh gen consoles.

According to Bonnie Ross from 343 Industries, the Xbox One will be receiving the newly cemented Halo 5: Guardians all to itself. As mentioned to Geek Wire, and further reiterated in a post on the official Xbox news write...

“In the past, ‘Halo’ games have pushed the Xbox forward, showcasing the console and its ecosystem in entertaining and innovative ways. Making a “Halo” game that runs at 60 frames per second, on dedicated servers, with the scope, features and scale we’ve been dreaming of for more than a decade, is non-trivial.”

“It’s a task that we, at 343 Industries, are taking very seriously to ensure we deliver the ‘Halo’ game that fans deserve, and a game that is built from the ground up for Xbox One.“

This is great news for anyone who put $500 down for the Xbox One in hopes of getting the best that the eighth-gen has to offer (that isn't on PC, PS4 and WIi U). It means that Halo 5 won't be a third-world-country-poverty-port from the Xbox 360 to the Xbox One, but instead it will be a true-to-form welfare edition made for a welfare console.

This also means that we'll finally start to see whether or not the early SDKs of the Xbox One were a hold-up, and if all those chalkboard excuses will be put to rest so that the Xbox One will finally get the edge that it's supposedly going to put into effect when going head-to-head with the PS4 in 2015.

The one thing I'm most curious about is what are they going to do with the gameplay to make it feel new, fresh, dynamic and, most importantly, evolved?

Right now Call of Duty is just riding on the coattails of its brand name. The gameplay has effectively stayed the same since 2007.

Halo is one of the rare games where the series tried pushing boundaries in the first-person shooter space. Even with all the flak I've given that series over the years, I have to admit that from Halo 2 to Halo 3 was a true evolutionary step up in the gameplay experience, especially with the four-player cooperative story mode, which is something you rarely ever see in big budget AAA titles.

While Halo: Reach was more like Bungie's swan song for the Xbox 360's aging tech, it at least gave gamers the graphically impressive Halo game to work as an antipodal offering to the visually sub-par but gameplay-rich Halo 3.

Halo 4 was mostly just cash-in, so now we have to see if Halo 5 will be a legitimate gameplay experience or if it's going to be to the Xbox One what Halo 1 & 2 were for the OG Xbox and what Halo 3 was for the Xbox 360. I guess we'll find out next year.